Hey everyone! We wanted to give you all a heads up that there are some art changes incoming for certain console item icons in STO. After Legacy of Romulus shipped, we had a little breathing room to take a look at some of the UI art aspects that we had always wanted to improve upon. CaptainGeko mentioned that he has always thought that the icons for the various Science, Engineering and Tactical console items that provide your ships with passive buffs did not represent their item as best as they could. We felt that these items could benefit from some higher resolution icons that better represented Star Trek technology, which has a very definite style established through dozens of amazing props, sets and technical manuals.

Aside from reconsidering their visual style, we also realized they had limited utility as actual icons. Unlike other consoles, these items do not have an associated power icon that denotes their function; their bonuses are purely passive, and the only visual interaction the player has with them is through the item icon. We decided that it was time to give them a refresh with a couple goals in mind:

Goal 1: Introduce a visual language into these console icons to make it easier to understand at a glance what bonuses that icon grants and what systems they affect.Goal 2: Recreate the artwork based on established props and drawings from classic Star Trek publications, like the TNG and DS9 tech manual, to make these items feel more appropriately "Star Trek" for those who are interested in Treknobabble.

With that in mind, please reference the linked images to see Old vs. New, along with a reminder of what each console does. You'll notice that I've grouped them together to demonstrate similar function, and hopefully you will be able to start to learn the visual language of these new icons quickly.

The most clear example of this new language is the items which give bonuses to certain weapon energy or torpedo types - they are now all color coded to the energy type they buff. Items that buff shields will have a shield bubble on them and all of the items that buff a science skill will have a little skill bar featured on them somewhere. We've also color coded the console icon backgrounds so it's very clear whether something is a tactical (red), engineering (yellow) or science console (blue).

Finally, we also snuck in a shuffle to warp core icons to add a bit more variety and make them more canon friendly. You can see the change in the image linked below, but basically we've added an icon based on the Defiant's warp core and assigned it to the "hyper injection" warp core item, which is the core that gives you a speed buff. This felt better to us than having the Sovereign core there - so the Sovereign core icon has been transferred to the "field stabilizing" warp core, which has a buff to shields. Finally, the Galaxy style core has been moved to the default/standard issue core that comes with a new starship. We've also added a new icon for standard issue singularity cores, though all the existing singularity core icons remain the same.

These should all go live in the next week or two, but I wanted to give you a heads up that they were coming. Ultimately we hope that these changes improve the STO experience by adding a little extra "Star Trek" to the art of managing your ships and items.

I like them. My honest feedback would be that the Engineering Alloy (Armor) icons look too similar to each other. Unlike the vast majority of the rest of the icons (across the board); I'd have trouble differentiating what is what on those from a visual glance at them.

Formerly known as Armsman from June 2008 to June 20, 2012 PWE Drone says: "Your STO community as you have known it is ended...Display names are irrelevant...Any further sense of community is irrelevant...Resistance is futile...You will be assimilated..."